For several applications it is necessary to synchronize your server to the network time. The protocol is called Network Time Protocol (NTP) and is basically giving the correct time to the world nowadays. Reading the Wikipedia entry is very interesting. FreeBSD comes with the ntp client. To set this up you will just add the […]
How to synchronize system and network time in FreeBSD

How to upload a FreeBSD custom image on DigitalOcean
Due to DigitalOcean not releasing ready to use images for FreeBSD 13 at this time, and since I opened a ticket a couple of months ago without a strong positive message from DigitalOcean supporting FreeBSD 13, I’ve decided to make use of their custom image upload service and give it a go. I must say […]

How to configure the IPFW firewall on FreeBSD
Among the three possible firewalls on FreeBSD (choice is always nice) IPFW is the in-house built one. There is a default, easy way, configuration path but if one needs to build a box to act as a dedicated network appliance with packet filtering capacity fine tunning the IPFW firewall configuration is more than desirable. Before […]

How to install Drupal 8 on FreeBSD
NOTE: Drupal 8 will be soon oudated. A newer article to be released on October 24th on how to install Drupal 9 on FreeBSD can be found here. This is a quick, simple yet effective tutorial on how to install Drupal 8 on FreeBSD. Drupal is a robust, complete well stablished CMS used on many […]

Live monitoring with Netdata
Netdata is a real time monitoring software that allows administrators, developers and architects have a visual representation of a system’s performance live. In short, porn for system’s tuners and other masochists but also a great tool to check system’s behaviour under load giving all members of a team to look at their part while the […]

What is UNIX?
UNIX is an operating system. And your known equivalent is Windows or the Mac. You may even know about Linux. The purpose of an OS is to accommodate programs in order to get some work done. Editing pictures, browsing the web or serving data from a database. It is the thing that lets you operate […]

How to install Redis for WordPress on FreeBSD
I happen to self-host a few WordPress sites on FreeBSD. And as much as one can configure OP-Cache to improve PHP’s performance, object cache is a must for many WordPress sites. This how to install Redis for WordPress on FreeBSD will explain how to install an object cache (Redis) for WordPress (via plugin) on this […]

A few useful network commands
Troubleshooting network issues with simple commands is not a very difficult topic once there is a little toolbox to pull from. Needless to say networking topics can be very complicated and any specialist on the field will tell you how cumbersome it can really get. However with a few set of commands one can get […]

How to manually update Letsencrypt certificates on FreeBSD
Update 05-2020: If anyone is interested on the automatic process you can read my tutorial on DigitalOcean about the topic. On this guide we will manually update our Letsencrypt certificate on FreeBSD for a single website. It is a simple operation that can be automated as a cron job, but seeing it is always informative […]

How to install OpenVAS on FreeBSD
Was ist das? OpenVAS is a vulnerability scanner. If you are unfamiliar to the vulnerability scanning world this can be an overwhelmingly experience but tools like this are what makes the matter more accessible, more manageable, easy to see and easy to fix. Before digging into the matter at hand here, that is how to […]
